Royal Australian Navy to get new stealthy underwater drone

The Australian Department of Defense has announced that the Royal Australian Navy will test a stealthy underwater drone developed by the Anduril Australia.

The stealthy extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle program (XL-AUV) was named ‘Ghost Shark’ by Defence in a ceremony on Sydney Harbour on Monday.

The ceremony included the arrival of a 2.8-tonne ‘Dive-LD’ autonomous underwater vehicle at Anduril Australia’s Sydney Harbour base, which will be leveraged for rapid testing and development. The Dive-LD has arrived ahead of schedule in a major step forward in the $140M partnership between Royal Australian Navy, Defense Science and Technology Group (DSTG) and Anduril Australia to design, develop and manufacture three Ghost Shark XL-AUVs in Australia.

The Ghost Shark program will deliver affordable, autonomous, long-endurance and multimission-capable submarines.

They will be modular, customisable, and optimised with a variety of payloads for a wide range of missions. The 5.8m long Dive-LD will be used by Anduril Australia’s engineers as a testbed vehicle to enable experimentation, testing and validation as it develops the XL version, which will be the size of a school bus.

The ambitious three-year Ghost Shark development program will involve capability assessment and prototyping in record time.